How does conspiracist thinking become appealing to its adherents, and with what political consequences? Drawing on fifty in-depth interviews with gun sellers from April 2020 to August 2020, this paper examines conspiracist thinking among US conservatives. We present a sociological account that follows historian Richard Hofstadter’s early account in theorizing conspiracist thinking as a “style” of politics on the Right. Turning to the sociology of culture and political sociology, we examine conspiracist thinking as a tool of political sense-making that becomes particularly appealing during “unsettled” insecurity. We focus on conservative adherents to conspiracist thinking, examining how conspiracist thinking is mobilized to assert feelings of control and certainty in ways that reinforce allegiance to conservative values and repudiation of partisan opponents. Specifically, we theorize conspiracist thinking as an everyday practice of meaning-making (an epistemological practice) which responds to conditions of unsettled insecurity that reflects existing conservative “modes of thought” (e.g., anti-elitist skepticism) and also reinforces conservative sentiments through two mechanisms: epistemological individualism and epistemological othering. Extending existing accounts of conspiracism, our analysis illuminates how conspiracist thinking—as an active, and self-reinforcing, struggle for epistemological control amid contexts of information scarcity and uncertainty—has come to shape American politics from the bottom up.

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“我不是阴谋论者，但是……”：动荡时期的知识与保守政治

阴谋论是如何吸引其追随者的，又会带来怎样的政治后果？本文利用 2020 年 4 月至 2020 年 8 月对枪支销售商的 50 次深度访谈，审视了美国保守派的阴谋论思想。我们提出了一个社会学解释，它遵循历史学家理查德霍夫施塔特的早期解释，将阴谋主义思想理论化为右翼政治的一种“风格”。转向文化社会学和政治社会学，我们将阴谋主义思想视为一种政治意义建构的工具，在“不安定”的不安全感中变得特别有吸引力。我们专注于阴谋论思想的保守派信徒，研究如何动员阴谋论思想以加强对保守价值观的忠诚和对党派对手的否定的方式来维护控制感和确定性。具体来说，我们将阴谋主义思维理论化为意义建构的日常实践（一种认识论实践），它对反映现有保守“思想模式”（例如，反精英怀疑主义）的不安定不安全状况作出反应，并通过两种方式强化保守情绪机制：认识论个人主义和认识论他者。扩展现有的阴谋论，我们的分析阐明了阴谋论思想——作为一种在信息稀缺和不确定性的背景下为认识论控制而进行的积极的、自我强化的斗争——是如何自下而上地塑造美国政治的。